United States

WPA supports artist-driven projects, advocacy, and dialogue so that artists can live, work and flourish.  WPA invites artists to conceive of programs that showcase the work or ideas of other artists (or creative thinkers, scholars, activists, etc.) and then supports them with money, introductions/connections, idea-development, planning & production, communications, marketing and promotion. In our view, artist-driven programming combines the best of two existing models—“artist-run” and “artist-centered”. It is closer in intent to the former than the latter because artists are curating everything—exhibitions, performances, talks, workshops, screenings, platforms, etc. Yet it provides a degree of professional support and organizational stability that an “artist-run” organization might not.

Push/Pull’s mission is to: Promote underground art and comics Foster community between those creating and viewing art Encourage emerging artists, illustrators and cartoonists Innovate the way art is consumed by presenting it in a unique environment and with nontraditional events Stimulate Diversity by actively seeking out marginalized and under-represented artists Underground art is work that challenges the viewer to feel something, to think about something. Art that is made by professionals that learned all the rules about making art and then broke them. Art that is made by professionals that never learned any of the rules about making art and made it up as they went along. It’s creepy, weird, controversial, strange. Push/Pull exists to show the alternative possibility of what an art gallery can be. In order to further our mission we’ve created a nonprofit section of our business that is powered by Shunpike. Our nonprofit work includes adult and teen education, community events, and cultural outreach. You can donate any time here to help support our work: www.poweredbyshunpike.org/c/PBS/a/37789 Learn more about our programs at this link Shunpike is the 501(c)(3) non-profit agency that provides independent arts groups in Washington State with the services, resources, and opportunities they need to […]

BUREAU of CHANGE is an education-centric lab for real art practice in New Orleans. We create, curate and exhibit socially and politically engaged work. BUREAU of CHANGE was founded by Margot Herster with a group of her former students and recent graduates from Louisiana State University. Originating out of dissatisfaction with higher education, particularly in arts and media, BUREAU developed into a new school in the form of an atelier-style studio.  A diverse group—established artists and designers, paid student apprentices and young artists, scholars and community experts, and the public—interact to create. Our objectives are influenced by the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project implemented during the Great Depression. We harken a a lost but not forgotten era when the government stimulated jobs in the arts by employing artists to create public works and subsidizing community education centers that offered training in arts skills applicable to industrial jobs of the time. Our process commissions artists and non-artists to collaborate on creative works aimed at inciting institutional change while studying social technology, digital media theory, interdisciplinary research and artistic production. BUREAU of CHANGE produces exhibitions, participatory and site-specific experiences, workshops and public programming, made-for-internet works, and collaborations with local and international […]

Founded in 2009, Durden and Ray is comprised of 24 artist/curators who work together to create exhibition opportunities at their downtown Los Angeles gallery as well as in concert with artist groups and gallery spaces around the world. Durden and Ray concentrates on small, tightly curated group shows at the gallery, organized by the members, and hosts international artists as part of a commitment to global exchange and alternative networks. The Durden and Ray model expressly overlaps multiple strategies, including the commercial potential and visual identity of a gallery, the democratic structure of an artist group, the potential to create collaborative works of art in the manner of a collective, and the shared fiscal support of its programs by group members and project partners similar to a nonprofit organization. Durden and Ray is committed both to individual praxis and to shared aims of curatorial experimentation, visual research, and artistic exchange with international partners.